Disconnecting, disappearing

March 1, 2014

Sometimes I feel that life is a constant struggle between the obligation to participate in society – as a citizen with education and privilege and the responsibility that goes along with it – and the desire to disconnect completely, and burrow deep into one’s own life and head and the sanctuary of home and friends and safety. This week’s revelations about the horror of Manus Island and our successive governments’ instigation and approval of it has just deepened my desire for quietness and separation from the outside world. And, of course, silence and inaction is complicity. I know. I’ve done the minimum, like everybody else: signed petitions, expressed sorrow and rage. Nothing changes, the despair goes on.

Sometimes, a sabbatical from citizenship is the only thing that will return my equilibrium. This week, that means taking leave of absence from Facebook (quite some time ago I deleted my personal Twitter account), sinking down, going quiet. And yes, I realise the irony of talking about this here, in blogland – but somehow this space has always felt different, and quietly comforting, to me.

This morning I was reminded of the week I took off all ‘connected’ technology last year, which I wrote about for Good Weekend magazine – you can read it here. Rereading this diary of disconnection just now, I was suddenly urgently desiring of that quiet, private space it opened up in me. Here are a few bits of it:

Day three

I’m growing used to this luxurious, expansive sense of time. But without the interruptions of email and social media, or stray minutes scooting around the internet in search of some small fact, this intensity of focus is actually a little wearing. I’m embarrassed: as a novelist, I thought I was used to long stretches of hard concentration, but it seems I’m much scattier than I realised.

On the plus side, I’m reading much more than usual: long, uninterrupted hours of peaceful reading during the day. It feels indulgent and blessed, like a return to childhood …

Day four

My email-avalanche fear is building. But I rationalise that there can’t be more than 10 really urgent ones to deal with – if anything drastic was happening, people would surely phone. I’m realising how needy I am. Maybe it’s not a fear of being pursued, but the opposite: what if, instead of hundreds of claims for my attention when I return, there are none? What if nobody has even registered my absence?

…

Then two “emails” from bemused friends arrive – by snail mail. One is actually a printed-out email stuck to a postcard. The other, a chatty note from a friend across the city, is addressed to me c/- Luddites R Us. I’m enormously cheered, for with my newfound privacy has come a subtle kind of loneliness. I miss the breezy chatter and fleeting thoughtfulness that email and social media allow. I’ve never believed the internet forces people away from meaningful connection, and I’m relieved to find that belief unshaken. Online talk doesn’t replace in-person friendship; it’s another way of expressing and exploring it, in ways that are rich and varied, funny and real.

Day fiveFloored by a savage head cold, I have to cancel coffee with my sister-in-law. Years of SMS arrangements seem to have eradicated my sense of telephone etiquette: when is it too early or too late to phone? A straight-out call seems intrusive. What a strange place I’ve got to.

Settling back into the yawning hours of privacy, I feel a little less like I’m wagging school, and more like I’ve been suspended. Will I ever see my friends again?

For the first time in years, I find myself actually reading the daily newspaper, and watching entire news bulletins at night. When I buy a printed magazine for the first time in 12 months, I realise that some of what I’m missing is not actual communication, but a kind of idle entertainment. Without the internet, most of my hours are spent with my mind fully occupied. I see now that the web, social media – even email – must provide me with a sort of twilight half-engagement. I thought I was an energetic, attentively focused sort of person. To discover how much mental laziness I possess is unsettling.

I don’t know whether it’s cause or effect, but I do know there’s a relationship between that laziness and the skittery, skating kind of feeling I get when there’s too much outside world coming in. But one of the best cures, the most solace, is to be found in writing. Other people’s, I mean, though a certain kind of calm does come back to me when I’m also fully engaged in my own.

He knows his measured views can annoy more outspoken people, but he believes a writer should be open-minded, curious, doubtful, able to slip into other skins – ‘a person who is in two minds about everything, and when he’s given it a bit of thought finds that he’s in six minds about it’.

and this:

‘We don’t really understand other people’s lives, because the events we see are not the significant ones. What you’re interested in writing about are those unrevealed things that have shaped the course of people’s lives.’

Maybe one of the problems I have with all the anger at public policy now is the great weariness I feel in knowing we are all so certain of everything.I’m absolutely certain our Prime Minister is wrong, on almost everything, and he’s just as certain that I’m wrong. The space between we just fill with noise, and rage, and despair.

So. Back to books, and Malouf’s decision as a young man to leave Australia for Italy.

‘I wanted to go somewhere where I could sit down quietly and discover what else I had to write, if anything.’

Next week I’m going somewhere, to the place in the picture above in fact, to sit down quietly and discover the same thing. I feel calmer already.

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8 comments

You might have been reading my mind, Charlotte. I, too, feel a relentless, low-level exhaustion, interspersed with frothing rage, brought on by what I read in the papers and watch on the TV. My old man and I have turned away almost completely from the evening news – it quickens the pulse and renders us into a state of babbling anger each time we watch it. So we turn up the music instead most nights – loudly – to 11 sometimes. Cooking also helps. And walking the dog. It’s hard not to be demoralised on a daily basis by FB calls to action – and how ever more impotent they tend to make one feel, no matter how many petitions signed, or how many horrific images and stories shared to the already-converted. Enjoy your country calm, Charlotte. Lovely to have you back on this blog – food or no food, Sally

I’m currently reading a new book called Overwhelmed (Brigid Schulte) which is about the overwhelming sense of busyness in our lives these days. Technology is part of it but not all; it’s also about how we *feel* about time – turns out this is more important than how much actual time a task takes in determining how busy we feel. It’s a fascinating read. Anyway, a couple of facts from the book that tie in to the discussion above so thought I would share:
1, if people are interrupted (by an SMS say) it can take up to 5 minutes to fully regain concentration on the original task
2, a study showed office workers only achieve an average of 28 minutes of uninterrupted concentration a day (shocking at first but I think it’s probably accurate for my job. Open plan certainly doesn’t help!)

Thanks kids. Wow Girlbooker that is incredible. 28 minutes! But I totally believe it. It’s what my friend Alison (who I’ve done some interviews with for writers) calls ‘fragmentia’ and she reckons it’s at the heart of a huge amount of stress in people’s lives (www.amindofonesown.com).

Sally, you put it SO much better than I did. That’s it, exactly – the calls to action and the impotence and the sharing of outrage and distress among the converted. Thank you for articulating it.

And thanks to everyone for comments in general here and the welcome the other day. Gee it’s nice to be back here. xxx

Reblogged this on ulithorne and commented:
When vintage comes around each year, and increasingly the moments in between, I too feel necessity (it feels beyond desire) to withdraw. Perhaps it is natural, the need to pull into yourself in order to focus and create your best work, but like Charlotte’ reflections below, it is also borne of a feeling of being overwhelmed by the excess noise and clutter. It’s easier to see these times in a rhythm of creativity, and then it feels tight to withdraw, rather than feeling as though you’ve just abandoned your conscious world!

Thanks for your post Charlotte. I totally relate to what you are saying and have the same need to disconnect and disappear from the world and to have some space and time to reflect and let new ideas come in. Thank you.

I too can relate!
You know that word we love for this condition,Charlotte: crowdyhead? That is me. This year I made a resolution to socialise less, to try and be more focussed and productive as well as to absorb less media. And I am doing both but the frothing rage Sally expresses so eloquently still occurs and I get an attack of the guilts about stepping away from citizenship.

I have picked one campaign for the year ( Jock Palfreeman, the young Australian jailed in Bulgaria, a case that has disturbed me since I first became aware of it,) as that is all I can manage in terms of time and not feeling spread even more thinly. I think this government is banking on us all trying to fight on all fronts- i.e. the environment, .asylum seekers, healthcare, education, the ABC, and they know we will exhaust ourselves. I really admire people who are able to juggle work, family and political commitment ( where does Tara Moss get her energy, I want me some of that! )

Book

Love & Hunger: Thoughts on the Gift of Food is a book about the emotional & symbolic meaning of cooking for people you love. It's a distillation of everything writer Charlotte Wood has learned over 25 years of home cooking, about the pleasures of simple food well made.

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"Wood writes beautifully about food. Partly it's because she has something to say about life, not just about food ... Wood's nimble food writing shifts seamlessly from the hotly contested topic of table-setting on one page to grappling with hunger on another. No philosophy, snobbery, one-upmanship, no competing with restaurant cooks. Just a lot of honesty and admission of failings, mistakes, triumphs and pleasures.
- Helen Greenwood, Sydney Morning Herald

"In this wonderful cookbook-cum-literary memoir, novelist Charlotte Wood evokes memory and emotion as she explains why she loves to cook and what it means to her. Slotted in among the reveries are recipes as diverse as an Elizabeth David-inspired milk-cooked pork and the hedgehog slice of a childhood in Cooma. It's a book that's satisfying to mind AND stomach."
- SBS FEAST magazine

"Charlotte Wood writes so openly about her cooking habits and history and her thoughts about the ethics of good eating that it’s impossible not to be swept up in her enthusiasm. Novice and experienced cooks alike will find something to inspire them here, as Wood has included a range of wonderful, tempting recipes. Reading Love & Hunger is like being invited into Wood’s home, seated at a table crowded with delectable dishes and encouraged to eat until you burst."
- Kylie Mason, The Newtown Review of Books

"This book has the power to reignite a passion for life, friendship, food and the everyday. Part memoir and part recipe book, Love & Hunger can be read cover to cover, as I did, just like a novel, or can be dipped into when the moment requires. Charlotte's unusual cook book is the wise friend many of us do not have ready at hand 24/7. Love & Hunger is a guide, an encouragement and an inspiration.
- John Purcell, Booktopia

"Love & Hunger manages to be a cookbook for the kitchen, a gentle read for the bedside table and a positive affirmation of the pleasure of cooking for family & friends ... This collection of 27 essays gently and sensitively explores the rich complexity and spiritual sustenance that good food with family & friends imparts to our lives. Each chapter explores, a different aspect of ‘the gift of food’ with a number of recipes ‘attached’; all of them good, none of them complex and many wonderfully comforting. There were many moments when reading, we nodded in heated agreement with the almost commonsense views espoused. As one other reviewer noted, it’s rare for a cookbook to move you to tears; be warned you may succumb. ... If there is a criticism to be made, we would only want more…"
- Tim White, Books for Cooks

"Author Charlotte Wood writes like a dream, wrestling with some of those common cooking conundrums, such as dealing with 'polenta paranoia', getting back your kitchen mojo and pondering just what the difference is between a chutney, a relish and a pickle. Her blog is also packed with scrumptious recipes - beetroot palak paneer, anyone?"
- MasterChef Magazine, June 2011